The Heart Foundation’s TICK says Junk Food is good for us
I really wanted to leave the heart disease thing alone after I said my piece. Then came more ridiculous news on statins, so I had to add an update. The new US guidelines virtually mandate that everyone over 60 takes these drugs, no matter how healthy they are.
Last night I was watching 7.30 on the ABC when a report on teenage depression made me switch channels. Italian cooking on SBS was boring (when is someone going to tell Maeve O’Mara that her hair style went out in the early nineties?).
The Trick with the Killer Tick
I got stuck on a Current Affair on Channel 9 (a program I have a really low opinion of), where I saw a young woman called Jessie Reimers who’s running a petition (she has 23,000 signatures already) to stop the Heart Foundation from slapping its red TICK of Approval on just about everything that claims a low fat content.
I have to admit that I never noticed those red ticks the Heart Foundation bestows on junk foods. I guess I don’t go near the badlands in the supermarkets as my friend Kit calls them. All I buy there are things like butter and cheese, olive oil and coffee, sesame bars and chocolate. We get most of our meat, seafood, veggies and fruit at specialist shops.
Here’s the Heart Foundation’s story
The Tick has been helping Australians make healthier food choices for over 20 years. By looking out for the Tick, shoppers can easily choose healthier products at a glance. They’re healthier because Tick foods are lower in saturated fat, sodium (salt), and kilojoules (energy) but they also contain plenty of the good stuff like fibre, calcium, whole grains and vegetables.
Sounds great until you see the Tick on everything from breakfast cereals full of sugar to highly processed dairy foods to margarine, vegetable oils, custards and frozen pizzas. No, I’m not kidding: check the list below.
Yes, the Heart Foundation is pushing junk food
Jessie lists a few fake foods like these:
- Praise Creamy Mayonnaise 99% fat free
- Gravox reduced salt gravy, Massel stock powder
- Dairy Farmers Oats Express Vanilla Malt Liquid Breakfast
- Uncle Toby’s Honey Cherios (wholegrain of course), Nestle’s Milo
- Kellogg’s Just Right cereal, Kelloggs Healthwise, Kellogg’s All-Bran
- Devondale’s manipulated milk products, Dairy Farmers Lite Pouring Custard
- McCain Pizza Singles, Birdseye Oven Bake fish fillets
- Crisco Canola Oil, Crisco Vegetable Oil
- Flora salt reduced margarine, Meadow Lea original margarine
- Extra light Philly Cream Cheese
Let’s get real
With the exception of Massel stock powder, there’s not a single thing on this list I’ve bought in recent memory. Jessie says the Heart Foundation gives its precious Tick to 1700 foods, which makes me wonder if this outfit is a front for the processed food industry. Here’s what these people are pushing:
- Highly processed foods
- Foods with dozens of additives
- Foods that contain sugar and salt
- Low-fat dairy foods that have sugar (lactose) added to make up for the loss of body
- Foods containing compounds that don’t occur in nature (margarine)
- Foods that are genetically modified (canola oil)
This is the result of the myopic focus our health experts have on cholesterol and saturated fats: instead of urging us to eat real foods that are wholesome and nutritious, they push unhealthy food artifacts on the basis that they’re low-fat.
Adding insult to injury, they refuse to review their advice even as the evidence piles up around them that they’re on the wrong track. After 20 years of ‘the Tick guiding Australians to healthy food choices,’ two out of three men and more than half of all women are overweight or obese, and 46,000 Australians a year die from cardiovascular disease.
Fast Ticks for Fast Foods
Source: Sunday Telegraph
‘The moment the Heart Foundation accepted $300,000 a year from McDonald’s to put its Tick on food such as the Filet-O-Fish and chicken McNuggets, the program was doomed,’ wrote The Sunday Telegraph in September 2011.
There was a huge outcry from consumers, public health experts and the media. Fast food chains could now claim they were serving healthy foods, and people concluded that the Tick was up for sale. The Heart Foundation backpedaled at a furious pace in order not to lose the last shreds of credibility.
No wonder we’re in so much trouble
The Heart Foundation is still advising us to eat highly processed, sugar-laden junk food that’ll give us heart disease and make us fat. Our dieticians are telling people to eat a high-carb diet that causes elevated blood glucose levels and leads to obesity and diabetes. Our doctors are telling us to take statin drugs that will destroy our livers and kidneys, cause diabetes and Alzheimers, deplete our muscles of vital energy and give us aches and pains every day of our lives.
And these same people have the gall to accuse the ABC’s Catalyst program of bias when it tries to present the other side of the story. Please heed this simple advice: Stay away from the badlands in the supermarkets, eat real food, and get off your butt – often.
Kim
